Nick Page

I’ve blogged before about wanting to live in the Moomin house. Here’s an alternative:

It comes from the rather wonderful Unusual Architecture site: a treasure-trove of weird and wonderful buildings. Makes me feel like all the renovation work we did on our house didn’t go nearly far enough.

Title: Sutton Vineyard Church
Location: Overton Grange School, Sutton
Link out: Click here
Description: Preaching in the morning service
Start Time: 10:30
Date: 2009-07-05

According to the Telegraph, the Vatican has just announced that they’ve found the bones of St Paul. The bones – or bone fragments – were found in a white marble sarcophagus along with “traces of a precious linen cloth, purple in colour, laminated with pure gold, and a blue coloured textile with filaments of linen… grains of red incense and traces of protein and limestone. There were also tiny fragments of bone, which, when subjected to Carbon 14 tests by experts, turned out to belong to someone who lived in the first or second century.”

So, the circumstantial evidence is good. But that hardly allows for the leap in the first paragraph of this story which runs:

Pope Benedict XVI said scientific tests confirmed shards found in the underground chamber at the church of St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls in Rome were from the apostle.

Scientific tests can’t do that. The discovery of bones from ‘the first or second century’ hardly amounts to confirmation that they are the bones of the apostle.

They’re in the right place, certainly. But the Early Church tradition is that the bones were moved at least once. Eusebius records that they were once in a monument on ‘the Ostian Way’. But there is also an Early Church tradition that the bones of both Peter and Paul were removed to the catacombs to protect them, probably during the  Valerian persecution in 258. (There’s an underground chapel in the Catacombs of San Sebastian which is covered in grafitti invoking Peter and Paul – this may well be the place.) The bones were then taken back to the shrine over the traditional burial place of St Paul – a shrine which would become the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura (’Saint Paul outside the walls’). This basilica was subsequently damaged during the Saracen invasions, then burnt to the ground completely in 1823.

So the problem is that you have the original bones moved to a graveyard and then moved back. The discovery of first/second century bone fragments, wrapped in purple, blue and gold cloth (the most expensive pigments) does seem to indicate bones which were treated with special reverence. But that’s hardly the same as ‘proof’ that they’re the actual bones.

Equally interesting, to me at any rate, is the discovery of a very early portrait of Paul. This seems to echo an early  description of Paul, where he is described as’ a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, well-built,3 with eyebrows meeting, rather long-nosed…’ That description comes from a piece of pious fiction written before 200, so may well preserve a genuine tradition.

Having said that, once again, there’s no definitive link between the two. There doesn’t seem to be an inscription on the portrait: it’s just that, according to the archaeologist, it resembles the ‘iconography that we know existed at around the 4th Century’. So because it looks like pictures of St Paul, and because it’s found near the Basilica people have put two and two together.

My own view is that places are more trustworthy than objects. By which I mean that it seems to me that the locations associated with Paul are more likely to be authentic than the bones. It is one thing for the traditional site of Paul’s execution or burial to be remembered across the centuries: it’s another thing for his bones to survive pure and intact. (Especially since, at one point, they were moved to a graveyard. Where there were, no doubt, rather a lot of bones knocking about.)

Are they the bones? Maybe. Is it a picture of him? Well, it’s certainly how the fourth century remembered him. But Paul died in 65–68 AD. That’s a long time for his bones to survive or his appearance to be remembered.

Sad news this morning. Jackson’s life had already gone beyond that of a precociously talented singer and dancer; like Jade Goody (albeit at completely the other end of the talent scale) he had become a metaphor, a symbol, a picture of fame and what it does to a person.

What he was, really, was a Prince. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean, literally, that’s how he saw himself. Looking at pictures of his possessions you get the feeling that this was a man who took the title ‘The King of Pop’ seriously. The chess sets, the paintings, the ornate carvings – I was reminded of Ludwig of Bavaria – another fairytale prince who built a series of music-inspired castles and who, like Jackson, lived in a make believe world, insulated by wealth from the realities outside the gates.

Compare Jackson’s penchant for military-dictator chic, for paintings of himself being knighted, for the regalia of royalty. Like most members of royalty, from an early age he was set apart; he never really knew what an ordinary life was. His behaviour, weird and eccentric to us, fits perfectly into the insulated excesses of renaissance princes and Romanov Tsars (I’ll bet he owned at least one fabergé egg). This was a man, afer all, who sailed a thirty-foot statue of himself along the Thames. This was a man who had an arranged marriage with another member of rock aristocracy: Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of the King of Rock and Roll. This was the King of Pop; who named his son, Prince.

Like Ludwig, and like his ertswhile father-in-law, I suspect that his death will pretty soon be taken up by the conspiracy theorists. Whatever the reality, the facts will be eroded by speculation and internet-fuelled fantasies, by people desperate to believe that he’s still alive. He was bankrupt, after all. He needed to escape. A faked death – one of his lookalikes perhaps – and he’ll be off, sharing a burger with Presley in a remote diner somewhere. You heard it here first.

Before the fantasies ruin everything, before the sordid revelations and loonie conspiracy theories distort the view, we should remember the reality: the Off the Wall album which proved the soundtrack to all those parties I went to in the eighties; the astonishing grace on the dance floor; the anticipation of each new video.

He was a man who was damaged by fame to an almost inconceivable degree; who died at too young an age. But then, he had everything too young. Princes always do.

I’m often told ‘you must be very self-disciplined to do what you do.’ I probably am self-disciplined, but it never feels like that. If anything I’m more deadline driven. When you know that book is due at the end of the month it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

The thing is, I’ve never really managed to develop a routine that suits both my work and family life. If I am writing alone somewhere, on the few occasions when I’ve gone away just to write, I find that I naturally settle into a routine: get up and start work straight away. write for about an hour then have breakfast. Then write till lunch. Go out in the afternoon, then write again in the evening. This suits me, but it’s not so good for family life. I’ve never quite cracked the routine at home. Every day seems frustratingly different.

Perhaps that’s why I really like this site: Daily Routines - How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. Maybe, if you can’t get much routine in your own life, then reading about other peoples’  routines is a good second best.

I also liked the quote from Will Self: ‘Overall, though, I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don’t, you have no business being a writer.’ This is what I shall use the next time the wife calls me Norman No-mates.

Title: Speaking at Le Pas Opton
Location: Le Pas Opton, France
Link out: Click here
Description: This year I’ll be leading morning Bible Studies and Evening celebrations at Le Pas Opton – the Spring Harvest site in France. In the morning we’ll be looking at the Big Story what happens in the Bible. In the evening I’ll be..er… doing something else. It’s a great venue, great holiday. Come if you can!
Start Date: 2009-07-27
End Date: 2009-08-02

I’m speaking tonight about The Longest Week at the Salisbury Arts Festival. (More info here). Tickets still available if you’re in the area. (Actually they’re stil available even if you’re nowhere near, but you know what I mean…). Here’s the blurb:

What really happened? Nick Page talks about his book The Longest Week reconstructing the events during Jesus’ final days. Nick Page will talk about his book The Longest Week which reconstructs the events during Jesus’ final days. What really happened? It was, historically speaking, nothing much; a death in Jerusalem, a routine execution at the edge of an empire. Yet that execution - and the events surrounding it - was to have a profound effect on the history of the world.

Page’s book explores the claims and explodes the myths. It focuses on the history rather than the spiritual and theological significance of events and uses archaeological research and detailed Biblical analysis to take the reader through The Longest Week.

The other day I had some new Bibles in the post. Produced by Hodder they are brilliant little Moleskine-esque Bibles. Here are some comparison pictures (Moleskine is on the right):

Typeface is good and readable as well.

And it also comes in a girly pink version. Which my middle daughter has already nabbed.

She can have it only if she reads it…

I now have, in my study alone, 30 Bibles. (Not including Greek & Hebrew versions and the ones in my Accordance programme.) There are quite a few elsewhere in the house.

I know it’s to do with my job, but even so. Maybe I should start redistributing some of them.

Wonderful presents today! From my kids a box of Lyra Ferby pencils. Just love the colours and now want to spend all day doodling. (And my friends Alice and Simon gave me the pencils!)

And from my wife a simply fantastic Alba wind up gramophone:the Alba Concert Soundbox. Click here to see (and hear) it it in action playing ‘When it’s Sunset on the Nile’. Now lie back and imagine yourself in the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.

Brilliant piece by Charlie Brooker in today’s Grauniad about the BNP’s new party political amateur video.

Here’s a good bit:

If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they’d have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don’t. They’ve got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours… For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can’t even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

Extreme right parties always stick their head above the slime during times of economic anxiety. The credit crunch along with the current expenses sleaze has given these opportunists another chance for some publicity. The real danger is not that they will ever gain national power, it’s that in the vacuum caused by apathy and distaste for politics people stop voting and allow them to get a toe-hold. Hitler’s rise to power shows that you don’t need mass-support. You just need to get a foot in the door. After that, thuggery, brutality and mind-numbingly simplistic populist propaganda will do the trick.

As a teenager in 1978 I joined the Anti-Nazi League to oppose what was then called the National Front. The trouble is that the ANL seems to have become the preserve of the Socialist Worker’s Party. I’m an old leftie (I was very proud recently when a review of The Longest Week accused me of being a Christian Socialist with a tendency to ‘go off on one politically’) but we need a broader base for anti-fascist campaigning than a load of seventies throwbacks from the ultra-left wing.

What we need to do is take this threat seriously. And for all of us, of whatever political hue and however we feel about parliament and politiians at the moment, in the forthcoming council and European elections, we need to vote. And while we’ve got Charlie Brooker, we’ve got hope.